Lost in the Cosmos

Berkeley who shares the scientist’s every interest but one: she is deeply and frantically in love with him and therefore is both miserable for fear he may not love her and also ecstatically transcendent toward the crowd of tourists, feeling sorry for them not only because they have been transcended but also because they are not in love.
    (c) An old Pueblo Indian dancer, who has never left the pueblo, who believes the cosmological myths of the pueblo and who further believes that the Corn Dance will invoke the kachinas of the West and that rain will come to the parched fields in consequence.
    (d) A young Pueblo Indian dancer, a sophomore at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, a major in business administration, a promising basketball forward, for whom it goes without saying that the cosmological myths of his tribe are just that, myths, to be taken no more seriously than what he considers the Judaeo-Christian myths of the Catholic Church in which he was baptized. He joined the Newman Club of U. of N.M. to meet girls and did. It is with a complex good-natured irony that he paints his body and dons the costume and enters into the Corn Dance, an irony compounded of a gentle forbearance toward his elders and a sardonic contempt for the camera-clicking Anglos and tourists. He can also use the money he’ll make from the photography fees.
    The young dancer feels that he transcends the old dancer. He sees into the old man’s credulity and the superstitious absurdity of the myth and rites of the rain god.
    The older dancer is no less certain that he transcends the young dancer because the young Indian has left an intact society in which life and time and place are given meaning by belief for the deranged world of the latter-day Americans who clearly do not know who they are or what they are doing.
    The scientist understands both and thinks that each is right in his own way. He sees the psychological “truth” of the cosmological myths of the old dancer. He sees the value of the skepticism of the young dancer. So he, the scientist, attempts the difficult feat of having it both ways—of not really believing in the kachinas of the West but of extracting the psychological value of the rite nevertheless.
    (e) The English novelist settled here in Taos after sojourns in Italy and Mexico. His pallor and frailty—he looks for all the world like a non-conformist minister from his native Midlands—contrast with his writings, which celebrate savage good health, sexuality, and the dark gods of the blood. Self-contradicted or not, he has a miraculous eye for seeing into things, getting the hang of things, getting a fix on people. For him, no more than a single glance is needed to size up everyone here: the young Indian dancer with a quite conscious irony written on his Oriental-Pueblo face, as well as a deeper, darker inscrutability which he, the dancer, is not even aware of. He sees into the scientist and his girlfriend and their somewhat naïve, even callow, American lordliness—they think they’re the god and goddess of a new world, what with their secret science and their secret sidelong looks at each other, each with arms folded so that his fingers can touch hers.
    ( f ) A divorcée from Westchester. Still young, her face ravaged by something other than years, she has left the dim sorrowful East and a sorrowful marriage for the bright clean sunlit purity of the desert. It seems to her that her very self has been transformed by the crystalline air, the rosy light of sunset on the Sangre de Cristo range, the tang of piñon smoke in the evenings. Surely she has come to the right place! She paints, has fallen under the spell of Georgia O’Keeffe, and for the first time in her life expects to come to herself, recover herself, make a new life in this place. She has talent, is taking lessons in oils, lives on a ranch, rides daily, and is becoming brown and strong. She is considering having an affair with a cowboy.
    (g) A Catholic priest, assigned to the adobe church in the pueblo, an aging Hispanic-Irishman who watches the dance with an indifference amounting to boredom. He is thinking about his added chores for tomorrow—a Monday and therefore ordinarily a holiday, but this year a Holy Day, the Feast of the Assumption, entailing three masses, homilies, and confessions—and about his bad back and his broken radio, an old Philco console. Tonight, unless the repairman shows up, he won’t be able to listen to Lux Radio